Ceres is a Cosmic Dartboard for Asteroids and Comets, New Study Reveals

Ceres may be a bit of a cosmic dart board. Scientists have found that projectiles that slam into the dwarf planet actually tend to stick and stay on the dwarf planet, which could help explain the characteristics of Ceres' surface.

Ceres is the largest object in the asteroid belt, and is also the nearest dwarf planet to Earth. Before the Dawn spacecraft arrived, very little was known about Ceres; all telescope observations showed was that Ceres was mysteriously low in density, suggesting that it was either made of very porous silicate material, or contained a large layer of water ice.

In this latest study, the researchers used the Vertical Gun Range at NASA's Ames Research Center to perform experiments. They found that when asteroids and other impactors hit Ceres, much of the impact material remains on the surface instead of bouncing off into space. This, in particular, suggests that the surface of Ceres could consist largely of a mish-mash of meteoritic material collected over billions of years of bombardment.

In order to see what exactly the composition of the surface was, the researchers launched impactors into a powdered pumice to mimic the case of porous silicate. For the possibility of ice, the researchers used snow and snow covered by a thin veneer of fluffy silicate material, simulating the possibility that Ceres' ice sits below a silicate layer. The scientists then blasted these targets with pebble-sized bits of basalt and aluminum.

"We show that when you have a vertical impact into snow-an analog for the porous ice we think might be just beneath the surface of Ceres-you can have about 77 percent of the impactor's mass stay in or near the crater," said Terik Daly, one of the researchers, in a news release.

The findings reveal a bit more about the surface of Ceres and show that, in this case, the dwarf planet is probably covered with impactors.

The findings are published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

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